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Modernizing AbiWord code

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Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#11

Post by jrapdx3 »

5ilv3r wrote: post #7
awill wrote: post #5

I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.

I lot of folks I tried to convert to abiword refused because it didn't default to .doc for saved files.

Always liked using Abiword on Linux, but the Windows version seemed quite buggy last time I tried it. IIRC Abiword could read and write in (some) .doc format, though that was not the default native format. Come to think of it, a decade or so ago, access to .doc files was a major reason to use Abiword on non-Windows platforms. It will be good to see it working again.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#12

Post by oever »

awill wrote: post #5

I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.

Very nice to see activity on Abiword. The enthusiasm of the author is evident.

Abiword does have support for ODF, but it could be better. Abiword 3 uses ODF 1.1. At the last ODF plugfest quite some issues were found [1, end of page].

There are now automatic tests than can be run to improve ODF support. The tests can be run from the command-line and give output as HTML [2].

Currently, there is a project underway that makes it possible to run the tests on a public test server which will show live results.

hub asks for tests in his blog post. For loading, saving and rending ODF files, the ODF community can help.

[1] http://odfplugfest.org/2015-thehague/report.html [2] http://autotests.opendocumentformat.org/

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#13

Post by oever »

boondaburrah wrote: post #8
awill wrote: post #5

I really loved AbiWord in the early 2000s. However, the fact that they refused to default to ODF meant I switched away. Who's going to store important documents in a format that only AbiWord can read. Still though, it's got many advantages over the LibreOffice bloat.

I loved AbiWord's file format. It was literally a basic html file, so I could confidently store anything in it and know I could read it later, much easier than any ODF.

ODF has many similarities to HTML. HTML has , ,

, . ODF has , ,, .

Images are also PNG, JPEG and SVG. Formulas are MathML.

Styling uses the same properties as CSS, but the are written in XML instead of using the CSS syntax.

The ODF Essentials book is good introduction to the format. http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#14

Post by bitL »

api wrote: post #3

If you think cross platform development is bad now, go back to the late 90s or early 2000s... this brought back some painful memories. Look at the old Mozilla C++ guidelines for more cringe-worthy stuff.

Kylix was pretty cool. I wish Borland didn't implode...

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#15

Post by bsharitt »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used it back when OpenOffice was just too slow and bloated to use very well on most computers I owned ~10 years ago and earlier. But through a combination of improved OpenOffice/LibreOffice performance and faster computers, I finally drifted away from AbiWord. For one, I still had to install OpenOffice for PowerPoint type work, so it was there anyway and it usually kept up with MS format compatibility better than AbiWord. I think the last straw for for leaving AbiWord behind completely was the Novell(?) patches that made OpenOffice feel more at home on Linux and stop sticking out like a sore thumb(and I think those were the same patches that led to the LibreOffice fork when Sun/Oracle wouldn't accept them).

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#17

Post by derefr »

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #2

AbiWord is my favorite word processor. It was so much less bloated than any other graphical option. I wrote pretty much all of my papers in college with it. It reminded me of my previous favorite from my youth: Claris Word. Glad to see it's still alive. Updating to C++11 should make it a lot more appealing for new contributors.

I used AbiWord years ago, and do recall it being pretty lean.

I get sort of the same feeling, these days, from Apple's Pages, though I'm not sure whether that's true. (Looking at the copy of it I have sitting around, the application bundle is 418MB, with 344MB of that being taken up by the Resources (icons, UI elements, translation strings) and SharedSupport (themes, templates) folders, leaving the app itself sitting at ~75MB. Not too bad, I suppose.)

One thing I think more people should consider, though, is how much of what they use a word processor for that could really just be accomplished using a rich text editor such as WordPad or TextEdit. Now those are light programs!

(And honestly, limiting yourself to unstructured rich text for the composition stage of a document is probably for the best. It keeps you on task, for one thing. But beyond that, anyone who has only used word-processors is missing out on the extremely natural workflow of separately doing your composition (in a rich text editor) and your document layout (in a desktop publishing program, like Publisher or InDesign) and then taking the finalized rich text and linking it to a text-region-chain on the layout document. It's so much easier to make your document look good when your text isn't changing any more.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#18

Post by samth »

Happy to see AbiWord, the first open-source project I was part of, continuing to do things the right way. The cross-platform approach in AbiWord has always been committed to quality over convenience, and I'm glad that's continuing.

Re: Modernizing AbiWord code

#19

Post by satysin »

api wrote: post #3

If you think cross platform development is bad now, go back to the late 90s or early 2000s... this brought back some painful memories. Look at the old Mozilla C++ guidelines for more cringe-worthy stuff.

People laugh at me but as I work mostly in Java I don't have many cross-platform bugs. The best I had with C++ cross-platform was Qt but even that has weird issues which are a real pain to track down sometimes.
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